


Carpe Regnum

by Anam_Writes



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Arthurian, Arthurian Legend AU, Dilf Claude von Riegan, Dimitri has both eyes, Eventual Smut, F/M, Magical Shenanigans, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Time Skip, Romance, except not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:14:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27912082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anam_Writes/pseuds/Anam_Writes
Summary: A hermit, a knight, and a King find themselves bound by a deadly riddle that could bring about the end of an age....“There is a question I must answer by the Millennium Festival in nearly a year’s time,” King Dimitri answered. “I have consulted with great scholars, mystics, and philosophers. I have called on my courtiers, my friends, my family. None can agree on a single answer; and so, I ride through my domain from Garreg Mach to ask my people, ‘were the King before you now, what would you most dearly wish him to grant you?’”There was a light in the stranger’s eyes. King Dimitri waited for it to snuff; when it did not, he smiled.“I have your answer,” the man said. The fire stoked, it blazed. The King caught only the tail of a green flame. “But first, I’d ask a boon of Your Majesty, and his word that he will give it.”...A loose adaptation of "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle."
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & My Unit | Byleth, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Marianne von Edmund, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 11
Kudos: 33





	Carpe Regnum

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this one took a while. A long while. But! I am really happy with the outcome thus far. Hope you enjoy!

Through the hills north of Garreg Mach, King Dimitri rode. With him traveled the fog, his constant companion from Monastery to village, dottings of lone dwellings, and yet more villages. Above him sailed the clouds, his scouting ships heavy on the sky. Ahead, firelight in windows cracked open needled through thick, rising damp.

King Dimitri descended the misty slopes to the crevice, where rows of wood houses huddled together, as though for warmth after days of chilled spring rain.

He was welcomed by not a single face; instead, a hound approached - head low and ears back - to greet him. Dimitri offered first his hand to scent him for courtesy, then a slab of his thickest cut from his saddle bag for his toll. Entry granted, King Dimitri approached the first of the lit homes on the muddy entry to the village.

“Pardon my intrusion,” he said, as he had on the doorsteps of many a-stranger before. “I have come only to pose a question to you, in hopes you may have an answer.”

Some shut their doors. Some kept them open. Some, like the family living near the entry of this village, let him inside. Dimitri gave thanks for this, and for the hot cup of cider they placed in his hands. Feeling returned to his frigid fingers as he held to beverage, clarity to his mind as he breathed in the sweet apple scent.

He allowed - in this moment of respite that gave such life, such clarity - the little children of the family to climb up the back of his black pelt. The older of the two, a small girl with enough might to master the mountain of a man, reached his shoulder. As reward she received a smile from the King and the chance to braid his golden hair.

“You’ve wandered far, love?” The matron of the house asked. “You must’ve! That’s Fhirdiad speech if e’er I heard it.”

The matron’s son and his wife came from the kitchen, oatmeal and spices ready on a tray. When the wife saw  
her children climbing the guest she squeaks.

“They are fine,” Dimitri assured the mother as he had briefly assured the grandmother before her. Then he turned back to the elder woman and answered. “I have traveled, but not far. I am from Fhirdiad, yet I only ride from Garreg Mach this day.”

“You’re with the Church then?” The matron asked.

The man took the tray to Dimitri’s seat and helped the man to balance it in his lap. He extracted one child from his pelt before the other. Dimitri nodded his thanks.

“I am a friend to the Church,” Dimitri said in truth. “I pose my question as much on their behalf as mine.”

“We’re all good, Goddess-fearin’ believers in this home,” said the matron. “We’ll answer as best we can.”

“My thanks.” Then Dimitri asked. “As citizens of Faerghus, were the King before you now, what would you most dearly wish him to grant you?”

“I would want a pony,” called the girl, being passed from her father to her mother.

The other, quiet and small, hid his face in their father’s shoulder.

“Good work,” said the man. “Somethin’ honest and well-paid, closer to a town.”

“I suppose,” said the younger woman. “Were the King to ask, I’d want to send my children to school: a good school, like the Academy in Fhirdiad or Garreg Mach. As we stand, only royal gold or divine intervention would cover a tuition that hefty.”

Dimitri nodded through a sip of his cider and made a note of that. There would be no handing funds to any who asked but arrangements could be made. Something could always be done.

He looked to the matron. Her lips and brow puckered in deep lines. She tapped a long, slim finger to her lips twice before, finally, she gave her answer: “I’d ask nothin’ o’ the King. We’re fine here as is.”

She had not been the first to give such an answer. From each who had done so Dimitri had pressed the point. There was a light in their eyes, a visible thought that snuffed from them as quickly as it was born. No amount of prying, he had learned, would convince them the worth in bringing back that light to share with him.

Dimitri finished the meal and the drink given to him and bowed at the threshold of their home. He would try again at the next, then again if need be. But the matron crooked her finger at him when he was set to turn away. He stepped forward to hear her speak low in his ear.

“It seems to me you’re seekin’ wisdom more than answers,” she said. “If you follow the spring through town you’ll find an old hut. A witch has taken to lodgin’ there these last two moons. Their magic is dark but they’ve yet to cause trouble.”

And so, Dimitri did as the matron said. He followed the spring through the town, through the dips of the hills, through tall grass that let out into tall trees. He followed it into woods of lush green leaves, painted an emerald luster with dew from the mist. He followed it until finally he arrived at the witch’s abode.

It was not an old hut, as the matron had described. With wood rotted through, planks from each of the four walls fallen to ground and only the skeleton of a roof covered in a canopy of stitched hides, it was the corpse of an old hut.

Within there sat a man.

What Dimitri could see of him was the straight poise of his back and square of his shoulders; even as he sat on the floor, just past a threshold that was once shaped like a door. He could see that his skin had a golden glow in the light of a single candle before him. He could see he had raven locks that turned a reddish brown - nearly auburn - in that same cast of the flame. He could count years like he could count pride in the crease of his eyes and the gray by his temple. What King Dimitri could see was dignity.

What the King could not see was muscle coiled tight around dense, solid bone. He could not see the story in his eyes: a passion for it burning hot, lit recently and tended with care since. What he could not see was all the same vibrancy Dimitri himself possessed.

Dimitri bowed to a crone when a tilted head to a maiden may have sufficed.

The man stood, though a pop of air in his knee made the motion slow. Dimitri, bent low, could only hear the approach of worn leather boots on the lush spread of the clearing’s grass.

“I heard from a matron in the village just downstream that I might find a witch of great wisdom here,” he said. “Might you be they?”

The man let air escape from his lungs. Dimitri noted the broad strength of the man’s chest in the rise and the fall of his wool tunic. He reassessed, for only a moment, what danger this witch may pose beyond the magical.

“I imagine I may be the one you seek,” the man said. “I am no witch, though. I disinfected a girl’s scraped knee. When it healed nicely I was driven from the shed I’d been allowed to stay in. I know no magic.”

“The matron seems to believe you wise,” Dimitri said. “Perhaps you may offer wisdom still, if not magic; as one does not depend upon the other.”

“Perhaps you’d best inform me of what wisdom the King of Faerghus seeks from a foreigner in his woods.” The man said.

“You know me for the King of Faerghus?”

Dimitri straightened. It was as a habit nobility would have one believe bred in. However, whenever the King’s posture straightened with formality, he could still feel the birch plank at his back, tied ‘round his waist as he crossed the room with a book on his head.

“Your likeness is not much like the profile on your coins,” the man said. “More youthful, I think. Your eyes are much wider, in truth - more like a deer than a lion’s. I have seen sketches of you from a trader near Derdriu, however. A Ser Ignatz Victor had the pleasure of drawing you, the Empress of Adrestia and Duke Goneril.”

“You come from Derdriu, then?” Dimitri asked.

The man’s eyes slimmed. He frowned. “Do I look to you like I come from Derdriu?”

“No,” Dimitri said.

“I thank you for your frankness,” the man inclined his head to the King for the first time. “I’ll ask again, and only once more: what wisdom do you seek?”

“There is a question I must answer by the Millennium Festival in nearly a year’s time,” King Dimitri answered. “I have consulted with great scholars, mystics and philosophers. I have called on my courtiers, my friends, my family. None can agree on a single answer; and so, I ride through my domain from Garreg Mach to ask my people, ‘were the King before you now, what would you most dearly wish him to grant you?’”

There was a light in the stranger’s eyes. King Dimitri waited for it to snuff; when it did not, he smiled.

“I have your answer,” the man said. The fire stoked, it blazed. The King caught only the tail of a green flame. “But first, I’d ask a boon of Your Majesty, and his word that he will give it.”

* * *

Clarity was a strange guide: a gnarled offered hand, an ancient quaking grasp, a sickly compulsion forward through halls in Garreg Mach.

Halls, a very generous term for the space Ser Byleth walked. It was a cramped vessel for those who traveled it. Both the knight’s palms pressed to weathered stone, damp with the morning’s rain. She could feel an uneven tap at the crown of her head where runoff dripped through the ceiling. She smelt wet moss, and felt it over every other crevice in the wall at her front and pressed into her back.

She had walked this way before; though the path had not been so narrow, or else she not so grown. There had been sun and warmth here. She had heard the sound of music through the walls rather than the creaking of wood beams above her head. There was a hand she held: small and freely given, a young steady clinging, a bouncing step that ever-followed her.

Clarity, she had named the knowledge; for it was clear, unquestionably so. Yet, there was no memory the knowledge attended. It was displaced from wherever its source lodged. So she took clarity’s gnarled, ancient, sickly hand ever-forward. She tread through monastery veins long abandoned, pivoting into each crack of wall where once, she swore, there stood a door, until finally she found the place clarity recalled.

Down steps jagged and large as an old dragon’s teeth, there hid a garden. It was a place warm in the earth’s cradle. It was not dry but not the sodden chill of the world outside. Songs played in ages passed echoed still on cavernous walls, an arpeggio that lingered with only magic’s aid.

White magic, Byleth could recognize the signature. Though seldom did it spring from the tips of her fingers she’d been able to hear it and feel it all at once since she was young. Each time she saw it cast she felt the spell of another strike as a chord in her body, then reverberate through something hollow in her chest.

“I remember this place. Not well, mind you, but its purpose remains clear,” Sothis spoke. “It was a place for children, a garden of their very own. It was for gathering, for singing, for learning to sing. No place in all the world could carry a voice better than here.”

“My head does fairly well,” Byleth thought. “I could not imagine any voice carrying quite so well as yours.”

“You think me loud, child?” Asked Sothis. “I will scold you as I scolded the children when needed; then you will know what loud truly is.”

“You scolded the children,” Byleth stepped deeper into the garden. It was wilder than any she had seen before. She would expect its form more from a clearing in Adrestian forests than from what she’d come to know as ‘gardens.’ She considered this as carefully as she considered Sothis words. “Were you a teacher, then?”

“Perhaps? I taught, I think, but the word does not quite fit. I was more…” She yawned, drifting as she often did. “More a…hmm…what was I?”

“Rest if you must, friend,” Byleth tried her best to sound assuring. “All the mysteries of the world will remain when you wake.”

“If you are certain,” Sothis answered. “But a request. Send me off with a song, just as the little ones used to.”

Byleth knew many songs. The first she’d memorized when she was young and amidst her father’s mercenaries. They were bawdy rhymes, set to simple chords and stamping feet. Their cheeks burned red when first she’d sung along, her face straight and voice unyielding, in her tenth summer. Then she’d learned hymns and a strange lullaby Rhea would sing when Byleth brushed her hair and tied flowers in uncouth braids. Her favourite though - and yes, it had to be - was the song she heard Dimitri sing when he wore a lighter mantle.

“They say-” Byleth gasped at the ring of her voice. That which was crystalline made clarity all the more ragged. Sothis had not lied about the garden’s properties. She began again.

“They say it’s the stars,  
Who weave our fate;  
Yet even a bird  
May choose their mate.”

* * *

The King and Queen of Faerghus were granted apartments traditional to the station by Lady Rhea: a bedroom on the top floor, overlooking the illustrious gardens of Garreg Mach, with a view of where brisk walks through the courtyard turned to strolls amongst the hedges. As Marianne sat on ornately decorated cushions in that very room, draped in the softest pelt of fur she had ever touched, drinking in the sight many Queens before had enjoyed, she could not help but picture herself among the hedges.

She was smaller down below. She walked stone paths in sensible brown boots tied tightly, bearing a heel only so tall as a casual ride on an lazy old mare might demand. Her eyes were set to the patterns of the path, gaze flicking upwards only to rest on a bird she heard twittering from a branch.

“Good day, m’lady,” Marianne imagined it might say.

She would be able to nod to the polite little bird, perhaps give him a crumb of bread from her pack. She would make her way to the stable, speak with the horses who listened so much more intently than people - like her uncle, like his courtiers, like her court now. The day would be spent quietly, pleasantly, and alone.

But it was not meant to be. Marianne sat above the trail, watching a procession of knights come ever closer from courtyard to garden. She could not hear the birds clearly through the glass and there were no mares and fillies to hear of her woes. The closest she had to a sympathetic ear had disappeared in the morning and not come back for tea. Though she loved Hilda dearly, her friend was not one to take great pity on a woman who’d married a King - unless her grievance was the gargantuan duty, which it was not.

Marianne’s eyes caught sight of a black and white fur trim on a mantle. A man tall enough to cast a shadow among his fellows, crossed beneath the covered walkway, cutting through the garden and towards the dining hall. He looked up as Lord Fraldarius chattered at his one side and stranger smirked on his other. His blue eyes searched the windows for her and, when their search bore fruit, his lip turned up in a smile that belied his power.

“To think the King of Faerghus would survive out there all alone in the wilderness,” Hilda remarked from over Marianne’s shoulder. “I still think he’s a bit mad, but perhaps it is the good sort.”

“I don’t think he’s mad at all,” Marianne said. The word stung in a way Marianne could not place but knew how to hide regardless.

“What would you call a King stealing away in the night leaving only a letter behind?” Her lady asked.

Brave, Marianne thought. Though not the reckless sort of bravery some of the King’s knights showed. She had thought to do much the same many times before as she lay in the dark, back turned to her new husband, sighing as she stared up towards the moon. Before Ser Dedue had found the King’s note she had imagined Dimitri in the sky above her, casting his great shadow, a bird singing just above her head. She understood him for a moment as the image took her; she had not thought he would return.

Then Ser Dedue read from the page: “Be assured, dear friends, that I keep faith as King of Faerghus. I hold you and our people ever in my heart, and so it is for them I ride out. Goddess willing, I will return within a fortnight, if not sooner. Yours, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd.”

Then all fantasy of a King in the skies slipped away. Dimitri was once more a lion tethered firmly to the ground, out hunting for his pride.

Marianne had never met a lion. She wondered if she’d understand them too, as she did the horses and little birds.

“Your arm, Marianne!” Hilda said, her hand hesitating just above the Queen’s shoulder.

“Oh,” Marianne broke from her reverie, realizing Hilda had taken her pelt from her and held out now a heavy velvet overcoat to wear around her gown. It was a royal blue, darker than the powdery shade she preferred but matching to her new country’s tastes. “I am sorry. Thank you, Hilda.”

Marianne slipped into the coat, tailored with mastery to her figure. It was cinched an almost imperceptible fraction tighter about her waist, making it that much easier to stand tall. It was a quirk of Hilda’s handiwork, she had noticed; one only her royal gowns seemed to carry.

“Your Highness,” Hilda offered out her arm.

Marianne took it with a nod and a gulp, looking just once more out the window to glimpse the King and his inner circle. She only managed to catch the tail of King Dimitri’s blue cape as he was ushered deeper into the monastery grounds.

* * *

Byleth was unsure of how long her head rested in the garden. The lids of her eyes had felt leaden by the time she heard the soft breath of Sothis being lulled to sleep from within herself. Recent days had found Byleth able to untangle Sothis’ fatigue from her own with less ease than before. Her own voice in her head began to sound as the strange girl did as well: far more indulgent, and much less disciplined. It was no surprise, then, when she promised herself she would sit for but a minute in the grass.

When the knight did eventually wake it was with a gentle hand combing through her hair. Fingers picked blades of grass from her locks wherever they interrupted the path from root to end. A familiar voice hummed a familiar song, more tangible than that which echoed through the cave, yet much the same.

“I am not surprised to have found you here,” Lady Rhea smiled down at Byleth.

When she was young this was a frequent sight. Her head would rest in Rhea’s lap and she would stare up into eyes molten with emotion untold. It had made her feel secure then, when Rhea was a watchtower above her small sleeping frame. She had grown since then and, though Rhea grew no less commanding in stature, the woman began to look small to Byleth, small and frail.

“You have always had a talent for finding the hidden corners of the monastery,” Rhea said. “I wonder, what guides you so easily to places such as these? Do they beckon you, or perhaps the wisps of old Faerghus tales show you the way?”

“I am easily bored and prone to wandering,” Byleth answered. She raised her hand to where Lady Rhea scratched at her scalp. Only the barest touch was needed before Rhea recoiled, remembering a pact broken.

“I see,” the Archbishop said. Byleth righted herself, coming to stand above Rhea and offer her hand to assist the Lady in doing the same. Rhea only shook her head, rising with all the grace befitting her station entirely unaided. “It is best you wander back, child. King Dimitri has returned.”

Byleth’s hand fell from the empty space between them. Not all the ringing of magic against cavern walls could drown out the beating of Byleth’s heart in her ears. “Where is he now? How long since he arrived?”

“It has been a quarter hour. He is attended by his inner circle and a stranger in the knight’s hall,” Rhea said.

Then that is where Byleth would go. Forgetting herself, the knight stepped halfway across the garden before remembering to turn and give the Lady Rhea one last parting bow.

“Wait, child. There is something I must ask you,” Called Rhea after her.

One foot on a jagged step, Byleth looked back to the Lady.

“What you were searching for, what I and Garreg Mach could not give,” Rhea cupped her hand over her heart, as though to keep it within her chest. “Have you found it in Faerghus? Have you found it with your liege?”

Whatever Byleth’s answer, she did not voice it. She turned out into the decaying halls. Whether she had or had not, Rhea forfeited the right to know long, long ago.

**Author's Note:**

> Lemme know how you guys like this story so far. As you can see I am doubling down on the "fable" feeling here and experimenting with how archaic I can go, so feedback is really helpful!
> 
> Thank you all for reading!


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